Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (14 page)

Those tears would have to be wiped away quickly; in that same day’s session, the
Network
filmmakers also saw Wesley Addy (cast as the UBS president Nelson Chaney), Lane Smith (the UBS news division vice president Robert McDonough), Kenneth Kimmins (an unnamed associate producer in the UBS control room), and Darryl Hickman (Bill Herron, the slick producer who introduces Max Schumacher to Diana), each in intervals of five to fifteen minutes. On November 18 they met Conchata Ferrell (who would play Diana’s programming underling Barbara Schlesinger) and Marlene Warfield (the philosophically pliable revolutionary Laureen Hobbs), whom they knew from the Broadway and film versions of
The Great White Hope
and from a curious incident in London in which she was arrested for biting a police officer as she exited a nightclub in Chelsea. (“A bobby grabbed my wrist,” Warfield later recalled, “and my first instinct was to bite him on his thumb. The next thing I knew, I was in jail overnight.”) On December 2 they saw John Carpenter, who was hired to play George Bosch, another programming executive; and Roberts Blossom, who had portrayed the ill-fated patient killed off in the opening scene of
The Hospital
and whom they cast this time as Arthur Jensen, the persuasive tycoon seated atop CCA.

At another fateful late-autumn meeting, the
Network
filmmakers were introduced to Arthur Burghardt, who had played Frederick Douglass in a one-man show and had appeared on Broadway in
Sherlock Holmes
. But when they invited him to read for the role of the Great Ahmed Kahn, the terse, hulking leader of the radical Ecumenical Liberation Army, and this six-foot-five-inch actor crossed the threshold of Gottfried’s office, all they saw was a physically imposing black man cursing loudly and brandishing a toy firearm. “At one point, this character bursts in the front door with a gun,” Gottfried recalled. “And this big brute of a guy starts shouting at us, with the gun—it’s not a real gun of course—but he was threatening us that he wanted the part. And we looked at this guy and we thought, that’s the kind of guy we wanted.”

Burghardt later said this had all transpired as he had planned it. “I went looking very much like a deposed street punk/gangster in the garb of a revolutionary guerrilla,” he said. “I think I put a toothpick in my mouth. I always believe in going to auditions looking like the part. And I thought, this may be something.”

Kathy Cronkite, a young actress who had appeared in the
Billy Jack
action movies, may not have auditioned at all for the role of Mary Ann Gifford, a Patty Hearst–like heiress who falls in with the radical group. The fact that she was the daughter of Walter Cronkite, the CBS news anchor and former host of Lumet’s
You Are There
series, may have assisted in this regard. “You have to wonder how much of that was Sidney’s and Dad’s old friendship, and throwing his daughter a bone,” she later said. She had no reason to believe, however, that she was being cast specifically because of who her father was, or for the ironic purpose of having a Cronkite family member in a movie that satirized the television news business. “Nobody’s going to risk a multimillion-dollar movie just because someone has a name that they like,” she said. “And maybe that’s naïve, but it’s what puts me to sleep at night.”

*   *   *

While its cast was being decided, the crew hired for
Network
was an intermingling of recruits brought in by Gottfried and by Lumet. The director chose his trusted editor Alan Heim, with whom he’d worked since
The Pawnbroker
, and his production designer Philip Rosenberg, who had already put in some pro bono hours on
Network
while a budget was hammered out. “I worked on nearly all the preproduction period without a deal,” Rosenberg said. “The expense of my fee is absolutely inconsequential to the making of a movie, and still the negotiation took until the week before we were ready to start principal photography. I worked on the picture anyway because I knew ultimately it would get together.”

Owen Roizman, the director of photography who used his training from commercials to give New York City a tactile and claustrophobic presence in films such as
The French Connection
and
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
(and who had similarly given Georgetown its haunting Gothic look in
The Exorcist
), was selected by Gottfried. Of his two cameramen, Roizman hired one, Tom Priestley Jr., who had worked with him on
The French Connection
and
The Exorcist
, while Lumet hired the other, Fred Schuler, whom he’d come to trust on
Dog Day Afternoon
.

Despite the ad hoc assembly of this team, its membership shared the desire and the know-how to film outside of soundstages in practical, authentic settings. As Priestley recalled, “When I started in the business in 1961, basically the cinematographers were, for the most part, World War II vets. And it was a more burly, adventurous group that was accustomed to hard drinking and living and all those things.” But newer, lighter-weight technology was providing camera crews the ability to venture more easily into the outside world, and audiences were increasingly expecting to see authentic locations on their screens.

“Television was demanding and the people were becoming more educated,” Priestley said. “The public didn’t want to see the old Bob Hope and Bing Crosby
Road to Morocco
kind of movies. They were all shot on a back lot, against a painted scenic piece or a backdrop. They wanted to see the real locations.”

At the end of 1975, with rehearsals and filming for
Network
set to start in January of the new year, everything appeared to be in order. Only one small complication had arisen: Daniel Melnick, the MGM executive, was unexpectedly sent an invoice totaling $970.64 for a wig that Faye Dunaway had purchased for herself, in preparation for
Network
, and which she billed to the studio. Melnick, in turn, forwarded this expense to Gottfried, and with it the delicate diplomatic responsibility of explaining to Dunaway’s agents why he would not be paying the charge—first in a phone call and then in this carefully worded letter dated December 4:

To reiterate the substance of our phone conversation, I urge you not to interpret the return of this bill as any lack of confidence on our part in Ms. Dunaway’s instinct as to what is right for her, nor as any lack of desire whatsoever, to accommodate her. The fact is however, that nobody from our production has had an opportunity to discuss the use of a wig for “NETWORK” with Ms. Dunaway or for that matter, any manner of her wardrobe, hair or makeup. On this basis alone my acceptance at this time, and or payment of the bill would be premature. Far more important however, is my belief that it would be destructive and an affront to the other creative people engaged for “NETWORK” for such a decision to be presented to them, without prior consultation, as a fait accompli.

Gottfried added: “We are anxious for Ms. Dunaway to be comfortable and look her best at all times.” That, he thought, should put the matter to rest.

4

THE DAILY PARADE OF LUNACIES

If the inhabitants of New York wanted to see a city in decline and on the verge of collapse at the dawn of 1976, they didn’t have to go to the movies or turn on their television sets; all they had to do was stick their heads out their windows. Monday, January 5, found the city in the throes of multiple competing manias. A Christmastime bombing at LaGuardia Airport in Queens had killed eleven people and injured seventy-five more, and remained unsolved, and fires raged in South Brooklyn, where a series of fuel-oil tanks had exploded. An austerity drive imposed upon the financially struggling metropolis, two months after it teetered on the brink of default, had stripped its streets of more than 4,200 police officers, and a newly proposed budget sought to cut nearly 1,000 more. Meanwhile, on the Upper West Side, Zabar’s had sold out its supply of a new home appliance called the Cuisinart—two hundred such devices and their gleaming, whirring blades at the discounted price of $135 each—in two days.

It was against this backdrop that the cast members and key personnel of
Network
gathered at the Hotel Diplomat in Times Square to begin two weeks of rehearsals for the movie. Paddy Chayefsky, Sidney Lumet, and Faye Dunaway each arrived from their Manhattan apartments, and William Holden and Peter Finch from their rooms at the Pierre hotel, to assemble at the sixty-five-year-old Diplomat, a single-room-occupancy hotel on West Forty-Third Street that had previously served as an Elks lodge but was now better known as the home of the Le Jardin disco and as the site, in 1973, of the notorious cocaine bust that drove the radical agitator Abbie Hoffman into hiding. The ensemble had hoped to use the hotel’s ballroom for their inaugural read-through of the script, but they found the hall unheated and had to flee to a nearby room to begin their work.

For some members of the
Network
crew, the most anticipated meeting of the day was the introduction of Holden and Finch, its one-time marquee idols, who had never previously worked together. Susan Landau, a production assistant, later observed, “Bill and Peter took to each other instantly. I have never seen such love and recognition like that between two people; such mutual respect. Both men had been there and back in their lives, you might say, and both had been away from films for a long time. They shared so much together. Anger, and respect for acting, and pride in acting.”

The more crucial dynamic, however, was the one emerging between Lumet, who as the director would customarily have the final say on all decisions, and Chayefsky, who held this authority by contract. The very presence of the screenwriter at this stage of a film’s creation was highly unorthodox; Chayefsky knew this, and therefore demanded the access. He expected total control over events, and he expected things to go wrong. “I’m a pain in the ass and I know it,” he said after the film was completed. “I’m a worrier. I’m used to panic and hysteria in a production. It’s always there.”

Lumet rallied his team on day one with his enthusiasm and an early instructional speech to the actors to keep their performances simple: they should emanate from “pure behavior” but should not be quite as naturalistic as his previous motion picture,
Dog Day Afternoon
, because the language of Chayefsky’s script was not naturalistic. After day two of rehearsals, the film’s script supervisor, Kay Chapin, recorded in her diary what she thought was the formation of a natural give-and-take relationship between writer and director. “Sidney knows specifically what he wants and is very adept at communicating his intentions to actors,” Chapin wrote. “Paddy almost always agrees but if he doesn’t he’s specific about his objections.… It looks like it’s a perfect combination all around: a terrific script; a director that totally understands the material; a writer who knows that he understands it and actors that are perfectly cast and adore the script and director.… It’s the first time I’ve experienced this kind of intermeshing—a rare experience.”

The company spent the next few days in the ballroom (where the heat had been restored), blocking out the physical action of their scenes in taped-off sections meant to represent the various locations of the movie: the UBS television studio and control room; the newsroom and offices; and the apartments of Diana Christensen and Max Schumacher. Lumet came armed with a notebook full of his hand-drawn diagrams for where he expected to place his cameras and how he expected each sequence to unfold, and he played all the parts not already assigned to his principal cast. His choreographed system left little to chance, yet it seemed to open the door to flexibility: if he came to a scene and could not remember his intended blocking, he told his actors, then it must have been bad.

While Dunaway immersed herself in her heavily annotated copy of the script, and Chayefsky laid out for the actors the intricate hierarchies of UBS and CCA, and where they were situated within them, Lumet seemed to keep a certain distance from his performers. As he privately told his crew, he had given up his own acting career because he realized that an actor has to reveal himself, and he didn’t want to do that; nor did he want to get into the personal problems of anyone else in the cast.

In fact, Lumet was observing his players carefully. In particular, he identified an “emotional reticence” in Holden—something he noticed during Holden and Dunaway’s rehearsal of Schumacher’s “male menopause” speech, where Diana is distracted by telephone calls and the declining fortunes of
The Howard Beale Show
, while he is pleading for her to love him, “primal doubts and all.” Lumet saw the scene as Schumacher’s confession that he and Diana “came from very different worlds, that he was achingly vulnerable to her and therefore needed her help and support.” But when Holden performed the scene with Dunaway, “he looked everywhere but directly into her eyes. He looked at her eyebrows, her hair, her lips, but not her eyes.” For the time being, Lumet said, “I didn’t say anything.”

On Saturday, January 10, it was time for a field trip. At dawn, Lumet and his crew embarked for suburban Nyack, New York, about thirty miles north of the city, to produce the very first footage for
Network
: the black-and-white amateur film of a bank robbery conducted by the kidnapped heiress turned leftist radical Mary Ann Gifford, which would become the kernel of Diana’s pitch for a new reality-based TV series called
The Mao Tse Tung Hour
. Outside a Main Street bank, Lumet staged the scene in about twenty minutes, stationing his camera behind a large rubber tree that partially obscured the action. Shooting began at 9:35
A.M.
, as Kathy Cronkite and Arthur Burghardt burst into the building wielding prop weapons and shouting swear words and slogans that would go unheard on the silent reel.

Cronkite, a relative newcomer to film acting and not much bigger than the gun she was firing, remembered being startled by the power of her firearm. “I shot it,” she said, “and it scared the hell out of me. I did not expect it to be as big and as loud and have as much of a recoil—even though it was a fake. I just went, ‘Uhhhhhh.’ And then I thought, ‘Man, I really screwed that up.’ And they went, ‘Oh, that was great!’ I kept some of those little fake plastic bullet things.” Lumet filmed a few more takes and wrapped for the day at 10:00
A.M.